After
Without much satisfaction they part, and for a moment he looks back at her through the window of her cottage, unable to get out of his mind that she stabbed her father twelve times. The sun is shining, they wave to one another amicably, she leaps up and stands naked looking after him. The fact that she stabbed her father does not, alone, intrigue him, but again, and still: why twelve times? No doubt the father raped her, and thrust himself into her twelve times before finishing. Or: he raped her, month after month, every month in the year. Or: twelve different times she was raped by this man. Or: she did not count and did not know. Since it was the police who determined and made it public, she learned as everyone else learned what it was that she had done. We do not know what it is that we do, we are apprised by listening and watching. When in modern life we do something, we are lost in the panic of our action, and in this way she was lost.
There is no signal that the girl’s life is changed by her meeting with this director, no signal that his is changed by meeting her, except in this one respect, that, having come to this place in search of a character, he found a story, and now “the story let me think of nothing else, not even of my own.” The familiarity of that chilling number twelve! He sits thinking/talking beside a turquoise swimming pool—a turquoise that one can taste!—bitterly minty—sliced by the camera so that we see only a triangle of it, stretching away from him. There is no point staying in this place.
Stories wait everywhere to speak through the voices of their characters, and we can have no idea when one of them will speak to us.
CARLO, PATRIZIA, HER HUSBAND, AND HIS LOVER
Un Café
On the Right Bank of Paris, in a plush little café, a young woman in pink (Chiara Caselli) introduces herself to a man who is caught up in a newspaper (Peter Weller) by saying that she has just been reading something fascinating in her magazine and wants to talk with someone about it. “J’avais envie d’en parler avec quelqu’un”—very polite, sweet, formal. He is American, she is Italian, so they speak in a deliciously awkward French that makes it easy for us to understand. “C’est moi que vous avez choisi?” he asks: “And you chose me?” She tells him a story of how in Mexico some scientists hired porters to carry bags for them to an Incan city in the mountains. At one point the porters suddenly stopped in their places and wouldn’t move. The scientists got angry and tried to rouse them, unable to understand the delay. After some hours, the porters started up again. The leader decided to explain. (She looks at the American, and he smiles, now beginning to be engaged.) He said they had been “marching too fast. They’d left their souls behind.” It’s terrific, says she, because the way we run through our affairs we are in peril of losing our own souls. “We should wait for them.” Now the man is skeptical. “To do what?” And she pauses before answering, letting a modest smile, an embarrassed smile, itself a little pink, creep into her face. “Everything that is pointless.” Surely this is a come-on, an approach? She is so young, suffused with such an air of innocence that covers her like a talc. Or, she is acting out of civility and a little loneliness, the quintessentially withdrawn European. Given that in this bustling world attraction is based on what is presented immediately to the eye, there is probably little difference between civility and flirting: either way the impression will not, cannot, last.
The man comes home to his (much less effervescent) wife, Patrizia (Fanny Ardant), who is strained with both boredom and anxiety in their lavish modern apartment. Tall and wraithlike, she sits in a dove-gray dress with her legs crossed nervously, in front of a painting of a ballerina standing in second position and bending over to massage her shin. Have you been with her again?, she asks wearily: it’s been three years since that story in the café about the souls. Some things, says he in irritation, can’t be called off overnight: the old, old story. Patrizia strides away, the tails of her swank garment fluttering like those of an undertaker’s tuxedo. “It’s her or me.”
Since at least in cinema we have come to accept interactions like this as commonplace, the torn, desiccated marriages of the monied class, we can move quickly through the chess that these two play, his breathless expressions of ennui, her increasingly taut fear of loss, his swelling apathy, her anger, all reactions to the central fact of impermanence (or that blurry prospect visible from a moving train), which is what the experience of life amounts to for these movers and shakers. Swiftly now, after a cut, the young lover pulls him into her apartment with a voluptuous (and starved) kiss. “We have to talk,” says he: the old, old story. He wears gray, she wears red: cardinal red, poppy red. On her kelp green velvet sofa she straddles him. “Talk … but caress me.” He closes his eyes: “I forget …”
It is telling the way we bounce back and forth between the different habitats that seem to occupy a single cultural and experiential space, without observing (engaging in) the transportation that leads from one to the other, as though locomotion is so prevalent as to be invisible. Did he walk to the lover’s place, did he drive, did he take the Métro or bus N° 72? Now, we look down from a balcony in their foyer as, coming home, the husband calls out for Patrizia, plays a few bars of something vaguely baroque on his jet black grand piano, and methodically climbs the stairs, a man in motion but without prospect. In the bedroom she is happily, drunkenly smashing a celadon vase. He finds her standing on the other side of a plate glass shower partition in the bathroom, leans forward to press his lips against the glass where hers are. Gently their lips peck at one another by way of the thick glass. Although he’s been phoning for days, she won’t say much. “Vase … fleurs … couleurs … beauté …” And we all fall into the trap, she adds: the old, old story. There is such a resignation in her voice, as though being trapped is the main preoccupation in life (the philosophy of Norman Bates: trap as modern condition). He says (in English) that it’s sad to see her like this, “drinking, drunk, desperate.” They’re on the vanilla-cream bed. He protests that he was on a trip. (Didn’t you take her?) He didn’t take anyone. She bites him, then laughs. “Last night,” says he—this would be a confession in virtually any other circumstance, but here it seems a banality and a ploy—“Last night, I realized how much I miss making love to you.” A difficult admission, since it implies and invokes nostalgia, the ability to carry traces of an experience across time and space and a dangerous state of affairs when mobility is at stake. She climbs on top. “I’ll come back if you leave her.” “Today,” says he, surrendering, “This morning, now, right now.” As they kiss, she murmurs, “Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me,” again and again, through tears, “Ne me laisse pas,” a mantra but also a child’s song. “Ne me laisse pas, ne me laisse pas. Ne me laisse pas.” Traffic is moving on a boulevard, people leaving people, even as the echo of her plea wears thin. Indoors again, watching the (same?) cars, the man turns to his lover, who, in a silver slip against a blue wall and next to a painting of a blue man hanging upside-down in agony, pouts, “Do you still make love behind my back?”
He is both alluring and lured. She wants to know if he has told the wife he will leave her. Today I pitied her, says he and she stamps her foot on the ground breaking into a bitter and impatient sob. As he moves across the room in a long shot we notice that in the painting there is a second figure, a line sketch, sitting on the ground and staring out at the viewer. “For three years you’ve been bringing her smell here,” she barks, “the stale smell of a cheated wife!” They fight, and he throws her onto her bed (a tangerine-and-white checkerboard duvet), tears off her panties and her platinum slip to reveal her tiny, pert breasts and hungry thighs, brings himself toward her belly and then her crotch as her legs spread and the scene fades. Desire is not only a fuel, it is a vehicle.
A car. It pulls up outside a decidedly modern apartment building on the Right Bank, and Carlo (Jean Réno) is delivered with an expensive black valise. Tall, purposeful, maybe a pilot. He enters, takes the lift upstairs (in the company of a girl who cannot take her eyes off him), lets himself into his pied-à-terre with a blasé sense of ease. But: the place has been cleaned out, almost every piece of furniture removed, and the gleaming parquet floors are an accusation. The huge plate glass windows all round present Paris as a bleak mist. In a closer shot, we see the man’s seriousness, his